Last week I talked a little on Csharpbuilder and Delphi in my blog. Great to hear that there a lot of other (ex) Delphi people around who do like to work with C# and .NET. In my blog I discussed class variables in Delphi and a workaround for them in C#. John Gunnarsson, another nice guy, pointed me to an article on using attributes in a factory. In there attributes are used as a workaround for another thing Delphi does have and C# does not. In Delphi a static (or class- in Delphi nomenclature) method (including a constructor) can be virtual or even abstract. In .NET you are stuck with the class methods of your ancestor class. And there are more things Delphi has which C# has not. Like the implements keyword. In a Delphi class which implements a couple of interfaces you can declare a member which will take care of the implementation of one of those interfaces. After adding implements ImyInterface you are ready with that interface. In C# you have to write stubs for every method of the interface to redirect the call to the member. Which is a little more work. I should mention that the implements keyword in Delphi does not work in all scenarios, sometimes you end up writing the stubs yourself after all.
The spirit of Delphi is still alive. C#builder does not seem to be able to pull Delphi people back to Borland, maybe Delphi for .NET can do that. There is a (beta) Delphi for .NET compiler. The language needed some additions and modifications to work under .NET. One of the main problems is backwards compatibility, Delphi has a history of years, projects created with earlier versions should work in the .net version as well. Borland’s plan is to release Delphi for .net with a new IDE (Octane, aka Delphi 8). What that IDE is going to look like is still a mystery, what I have seen in C#builder does not make me very optimistic. I wish they concentrated on a Delphi.NET for VS.NET but I don’t think the marketing department of Borland will agree on that. I would buy a copy.
